Executive Producer Wendy Mericle and the actor unmasked as Prometheus talk about the big reveal.

Warning: Spoilers for tonight’s episode of Arrow “Fighting Fire With Fire” are being discussed in this article. If you are on the West Coast or just haven’t seen the episode yet, read no further!

The secret identity of Prometheus was revealed in tonight’s episode of Arrow, and the man under the mask is … Adrian Chase? Wait, wasn’t he supposed to be Vigilante?

“One of the reasons we did do it was because everybody would be thinking ‘of course he’s going to be Vigilante’,” Executive Producer Wendy Mericle said during a press call held late last week. “Of course Adrian Chase is Vigilante in the comic books, and we thought it would be a really fun twist to do what we’ve always done on the show which is to take the comic book mythology and turn it on its head and see what kind of story we can mine from a surprise like that. It was also something different for this season. We wanted to change up how we introduced the big bad and change up when we did it, how we did it, and hopefully we succeeded in that this year.”

“We always knew that Adrian Chase — and Josh Segarra, who is playing him — was our Big Bad,” Mericle confirmed. We always knew that’s what we wanted him to be,;that’s how we wanted to build it. I think in the timing of this specific episode, we had to play around with that a little bit more. There are certain moments in the season where you obviously want to build to. We could have done it in 5×09, we could have done it even later in 5×18. But I think we try, as much as possible, we try to let the stories dictate when these big reveals happen. It just felt right here, and it just felt right also to do it in the middle of the episode, and that also, I think, played against expectations in a good way,” she said.

Team Arrow learning the Prometheus identity is something that won’t happen immediately. “When Oliver and the team do find out — which will happen later in the season, obviously it will happen somewhere after this episode and before the finale — I think one of the fun parts about what we’ve done is to really allow us to live with that reveal for a while and seeing the characters not knowing what their lives are like, still continuing to interact with Adrian Chase in City Hall and elsewhere without knowing his real identity. We really like the idea of doing that in story, and we’re going to play around with that for a little while before we let Oliver and the team find out,” Mericle said.

“I think what’s so interesting for us is how close those parallels are with Oliver’s own story,” Mericle explained about the comparison between Chase and Queen. “We really did want to this season build a villain that’s a dark mirror for Oliver, in the tradition of the comic books and honoring that. And honoring Oliver’s past on the show, especially the first season. Seeing what it was like going through the loss. They’ve both suffered losses and they’ve both answered those losses in very different ways.”

Navigate below to see what actor Josh Segarra (Adrian Chase) had to say!

Craig Byrne

Craig Byrne has been writing about TV on the internet since 1995. He is also the author of several published books, including Smallville: The Visual Guide and the show's Official Companions for Seasons 4-7.